Word: drunkenness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...living room of a suite in Kirkland House there is an armchair. That is where Doug sits-indeed, that is where Doug lives. It is an old chair, an uncomfortable chair, a smelly chair (a drunken kid from across the hall pissed on it once)-but Doug doesn't care. Why should...
...world's elbow-bending cultures-which is to say the overwhelming majority of the world's cultures. Man in his cups is presumed to be irresponsible, out of control; by anaesthetizing the higher centers of the brain, alcohol unshackles the primordial beast. In Drunken Comportment, published by Aldine Press, two U.C.L.A. social scientists challenge this venerable theory. Intoxication, say Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton, has rules equally as strict as sobriety. Once they are mastered, the drunk strives conscientiously, and usually successfully, to obey them...
...Drunken Comportment rejects the legend that the North American Indian could not hold his firewater. More typically, he had to be coaxed at first even to sample it. A tribe would cautiously nominate its oldest-and therefore most expendable-member to take the first sip. Daniel Harmon, a 19th century fur trader whose journal is extensively quoted, reported that as often as not, alcohol had a tranquilizing effect on the Indian initiates. "I had rather have 50 drunken Indians in the fort," he wrote, "than five drunken [French] Canadians." Indeed, the wild and murderous debauches attributed to Indians...
Edgerton and MacAndrew do not deny the physical effects of drink on, say, a man's ability to walk and talk straight. They do argue that these effects are offset by behavior that is "essentially a learned affair." Their moral: "Since societies, like individuals, get the sorts of drunken comportment that they allow, they deserve what they...
...good old silent college days, the duties of the kindly campus cop were rarely more critical than controlling a panty raid, lecturing a drunken student or investigating a petty theft. That serene existence has long since passed. Today's city-size universities have spawned an increasing crime rate and a restive student body. As a result, many university administrators are recruiting a new breed of campus gendarme...